Oil companies enjoy a monopoly in many aspects of our lives – oil essentially runs the world right now so I don’t know that biofuels would necessarily be a big threat to them. In fact, a lot of oil companies are trying to get on board with biofuels such as algae development. The fact is, petroleum is a non-renewable resource, so it wouldn’t be to their advantage to not embrace forms alternative energy. However, according to a Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study the development of biofuels might not be worth it: the amount of energy needed to develop them it shows, is more than the amount of energy they can produce.